FEATURES - EarthBound - Mother 3 Game Description :: In the mid 90's, around the release of Mother 2, Shigesato Itoi started work on a 3D Mother for Nintendo's up-coming Nintendo 64. Even with no experience in programming immense 3D worlds, Itoi's development team gave it their best shot. What followed were the series' darkest years for both its fans and its creator. In January 1997, the team released their first demo screenshots to the press. Even with its relatively simple graphics and beyond strange characters, Mother 3 seemed at least appealing to an RPG-free N64 market. At this time, we learned of the game's 12-chapter storyline, swapping main characters, and a few of its important characters and locations (such as Dr. Andonuts, Mr. Saturn, and Tatsumairi Village). At this time, the release for the game was set for Spring 1998, which seemed like an eternity to us die-hard fans. If only we had known! It was soon revealed that the project would see its final incarnation on the Nintendo 64 Disc Drive, an add-on system to the N64 that could handle larger games with relative ease. Unfortunately, this system saw delays, and eventually pushed Mother 3 all the way to a Fall 1999 release date. The Spaceworld '99 trade show came, where a fully playable demo of Mother 3 was shown to the public. By then, with all the 64DD's release delays, Itoi's team had time to make the game even better, with far prettier graphics to boot. If the game were to be released right then, Mother and EarthBound fans on both sides of the ocean would've gobbled it up. But under the hood, things weren't going as well as they seemed. Mother 3 was littered with bugs that the developers reportedly had few ways to get around. The game was plugged from the 64DD plan and brought back to regular game cartridge media, most likely to limit how much fixing the developers had to deal with. Delay upon delay ensued, until finally, in August of 2000, Mother 3 was cancelled. In hindsight, the cancellation of the Nintendo 64 version of Mother 3 doesn't seem like a very big deal, but at the time, it hit an already weak fanbase pretty hard, especially in America (where the game was known as "EarthBound 64"). Years and petitions passed with no word of the game's future, until finally, in 2003, Mother 3's Game Boy Advance revival was announced. When this handheld version was finally released in 2006, it revealed practically all of EarthBound 64's secrets. However, 4 of the game's planned 12 chapters had either been cut or incorporated into other, larger chapters. It will likely always remain a mystery what ever happened to this cut gameplay. EarthBound 64 leaves only this and the possibility of a 3D Mother game lost in the past.